Being on the outside

UBC’s decision to establish a presence in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside made many people in both the Downtown Eastside and the university ask skeptical questions. Why is UBC making this move? What’s the real agenda? What does a mainstream, research-intensive unive...

There are as many stories of social marginalization as there are people living in places like Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Every story is unique. But there are some common patterns. People experience abuse in childhood, they become mentally ill, they...

When I began working in the Downtown Eastside, I believed that one way to prevent or ameliorate social marginalization was to treat people with respect. When we opened the Learning Exchange storefront , respect was the number one value we tried to emphasize ...

Advocates for social justice believe they have the answer to the problems of poverty and marginalization. They believe their approach is an improvement over charitable approaches that characterized efforts to help "the underprivileged” in earlier times. Va...

My experiences going back and forth between UBC and the Downtown Eastside led me to conclude that poverty and other signs of social inequality and injustice have roots that are even more profound than the social justice or other discourses suggest. After a f...

Much of the language we use to describe social exclusion is based on spatial metaphors. Talking about the margins evokes an image of a circle or a series of concentric circles. Alternatively, referring to the mainstream and the margins may evoke an ...